Questions to Answers

As the light from the sun limps weakly through the clouds, I bask in it. I feel like a sea lion on a black rock – exposed but warming slowly from its connection with the solidity underneath me. There is a sense of expectation – of change – in the air…in MY air…. There is nothing that invigorates me more than a sense of the unknown approaching with the rapidity of a bullet train. And nothing makes me feel more afraid or more alive.

Often I’ve been completely and utterly wrong – nothing huge or horrifying or wonderful has happened that I have noticed – after experiencing this particular sense of “vertigo”. Perhaps – not anything that I have noticed. Still, it energises me and at those times I feel strong enough to carry the burdens of Sisyphus. Afterwards, it leaves me wondering. It leaves me with more questions than answers.

I wonder at this perceived courage – that peculiar blend of knowledge and action mixed with fear. Put a squash racquet in my hand, and I’ll play anyone till I drop…even if it means dragging my broken and scarred body to the end of its endurance. Point to a mountain and dare me, and I’ll start climbing – even if I risk a fall onto something nasty many metres below – or a heart attack these days, more like. Put me on a water ski, travelling on a thin piece of wood (or Kevlar) at 50 kilometres per hour with nothing between myself and the concrete clad (at that speed) water below and I’ll hang on until my arms go numb from exhaustion. Put an oxygen tank and a wetsuit upon my person, and I will soar happily within the element of water as long as the breathable air lasts. Place me on the back of a feisty stallion that hasn’t been ridden in a while, and I’ll stick to that thing like a gnat on an elephant’s ear – until brushes me off against a boxthorn hedge, or a barbed wire fence. Then I’ll get back on again.

Courage or stupidity?

Tell me I am going to meet the man of my dreams and become “betrothed” again – and I will lock down faster than a nuclear power plant on full scale leak-alert.

Fear? How utterly bizarre! I have lived fully and completely in many moments of physical danger. But the mere possibility of emotional pain at some point in an unknowable future frightens me more than facing war, pestilence, an approaching tsunami, or the rumble of the biggest earthquake imaginable. How is it that something so seemingly small can have that affect? I know I am not alone in such things. One of my closest and dearest friends will happily stand on a stage in front of thousands of people and play music that he has composed, waiting for acceptance (or otherwise) from a group of strangers who mean nothing to him whatsoever. No problemo. And yet – he dissolves in terror at the mere thought of “committing” to another human being in a loving relationship.

Ah the power of emotion! We fall in love, we fall out of love – or someone falls out of love with us. Lives are changed irrevocably due to that mere emotional connection – people have taken their own lives because of the pain of a broken heart. Some have taken others’ lives. Wars have broken out due to the threat of loss of loved ones and at the merest threat of a change in our “safe” environment.

All that I do, all that I know, all that I remember – is attached to an emotion of some kind during my life. I hear a song and I am 16 again, walking hand in hand with my very first boyfriend. I smell meat roasting and I am back at home, waiting for my mother to serve dinner on a cold winter’s evening in Christchurch. I hear a child cry in the distance, and I am suddenly chasing my toddler across the sand at the beach as she squeals in delight – many years ago. Memories of pleasure.

I climb Mt Taranaki at age 14 – and I realise I am doing it to make someone proud of me – my father. When he doesn’t comment on my achievement, I felt more pain in my heart than I felt in my jellied and aching legs and arms at that time. Memories of rejection and pain.

I sense from somewhere that the key to our true happiness is in maintaining control of our own feelings, of not allowing these to be defined by others, but ensuring they are defined and decided by ourselves alone. And I also know – no matter what – I cannot fall in love with someone by simply “deciding” to.

The mysteries keep me breathing – and will keep me searching I think, long after my last breath escapes me. “Ask and you shall receive”. Receive what? More questions?? Oh, I sure do hope so.